A*STAR DSI develops Big Data software for tourism industry

Singapore’s Data Storage Institute (DSI), a research institute of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) has developed a big data software that enables travel companies and hotels to tap the growth potential of online travel bookings.

 

The new software leverages the multitude of data exchanged with potential holidaymakers on the internet. Fuelled by the rise of the internet-savvy middle class and prolific use of mobile web, mobile travel bookings are expected to triple by 2013. 

 

DSI’s also aims to extend the software's use to the hospitality sector for business insights. Through a partnership with five hotels and Fujitsu, DSI will jointly develop a hotel booking application. The software aims to collate travel information requests, event searches, points of interests, and geo-location data on mobile devices so hotel managers will be able to tap on the business intelligence obtained to improve the overall service quality of the hotel. 

 

A technology development study conducted by DSI researchers found that a significant amount of transactional data exchanges on travel booking and reservation information were duplicates. Based on this finding, DSI researchers designed an intelligent software that operates on in-memory compute grid technology, smart cache mechanisms, context-aware algorithms and commodity servers to enable reduction of workloads, quick searches and interpretation of large pools of data collected which are indexed based on time-stamps.